#NPM2026

A Lady Comes to an Inn

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We first meet any poem as a stranger. And in going through Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  for this year’s National Poetry Month series, I often met on its pages poets I knew nothing about. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one. This poem of hers, “A Lady Comes to an Inn”  is emblematic of that – starting with strangeness, ending with wonder.

The poem begins when a quartet of strangers comes to an inn. Two of them are described as men of color, a third gets even less description, but he has a wife – the “lady” of the title.

The rest of the poem is observations of that lady. Normal expectations and timeworn poetic tropes may blind us as she is first described. First, we’re told her hair is pale and somewhat transparent. Is she just blonde or perhaps white haired? Well, twice we’re given images of translucency: champagne and ale. Perhaps that’s a trick of the light, but even if the number and pigment of hair strands change with age, they’re still opaque. Perhaps the poem’s descriptive inventory of a lighter hair color, creamy complexion, and a rosy mouth hew so closely to many a poem and folk-song’s conventions we’ll be lulled into this opening as so much boilerplate.*

A Lady Comes to an Inn

Likely not intended, but I was reminded by the title of this poem of the old ethnic-joke form that starts with a group of nationalities or religions who walk into a bar and….

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Things start to slip by the third verse: she speaks a language “nobody knows.” Does she speak this unknown tongue only some of the time, perhaps with her three companions, or is that unknown language her only one? The poem’s not clear on this, or even what the speech of the three men is like – they’re silent for all we know. This third verse has the two lines that “sold” the poem to me on first reading: “But sometimes she’d scream like a cockatoo/And swear wonderful oaths that nobody knew.”

Now we’re fully in strangeness. The cockatoo screech must have been startling, though no startling of those who have met these strangers is noted, and the oaths that may be understood as curses only from their musical tenor or other context, are said to be “wonderful.”

I get a sense of beguilement by the strangers, and the fourth verse may be to indicate that: the poem’s observer is gawking down the woman’s décolletage to read her tattoos. And what’s with those “bronze slippers?” Poetically fancified way to say brown shoes? Or are they really metal shoes. Weird. And no one can obtain the lady’s name. Language barrier? Beguilement? Since the other three in the quartet of strangers are unremarked on after the first stanza, the lady is holding everyone’s attention. Nobody knows where the lady and the others have come from, though it’s surmised it’s “marvelous.”

And then the poem and its strangers skip town, and the poem is the sum of the inn’s countrysider’s remembrance.

Let me be honest. On first reading I was picturing a quasi-Romani/”gypsy” encounter, and I even thought the poem might be seen as vaguely racist in an exoticist manner. Rather, I believe we’re supposed to get that sense – but the poem doesn’t say Roma explicitly, and easily could. That’s a misdirect. I think the countrysiders may even think the travelers are Romani at first. Taken more carefully, with a little more attention, I can see an unwritten final verse where a gray and time-jumping Rod Serling steps out from behind the inn to give us a benediction about being hospitable to strange travelers.

Did Coatsworth intend extraterrestrials? Modern readers might see that in the spaces between what she outlines in her poem: the thin extended limbs, pale skin, the indecipherable language, the metal shoes – ET, your inclusion in an important Modernist poetry anthology has come through. But in the early 1920s when Coatsworth published this poem, I think were more at fairy folk in her intent.

I spent an afternoon today reading more about Coatsworth’s interesting life and other literary work. Untermeyer makes much of her world-traveler resume in his anthology’s introduction of Coatsworth, and from further study it does look to be remarkable. As a young woman in the early 20th century she rode horseback across the Philippines and traveled widely in China and elsewhere in Asia – as well as the more common European “Grand Tour” stuff.** Though starting off as a poet for three book-length collections, she was a prolific writer in a variety of genres, including children’s literature and fantasy. Her most remembered work is an early Newbery Medal winner, The Cat Who Went to Heaven,  a children’s book with unusual subject matter melding extensive dharma talk with a Charlotte’s Web plot published in 1930. One of the highlights in today’s research was reading a couple of accounts by Coatsworth’s daughter, poet Kate Barnes, who writes about what her mother was like and the life she eventually led in rural Maine.

I wanted a contrast with the slower, sparer music I have used for the first two episodes; and when I had an hour in my studio space Friday, I quickly recorded three energetic takes of the music I wrote for “A Lady Comes to an Inn.”  Kate Barnes writes her mother wrote quickly,*** and that rhymes with my usual recording necessities these days: the first thought had to be a good enough thought. When I went to mix the resulting tracks, I realized I had a problem. I had played my jumbo 12-string guitar, and that beast when I pick it at a rapid tempo produces a lot of clashing harmonic content. It took a few tries using some mixing magic to temper that issue with the recording you can hear below using the audio player gadget. Has the audio gadget left for fairy land or Aldebaran? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog glamor the display of such a player, and so I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

 

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*The lady’s elongated thinness also described may not stop the reader at first either, but the young maples in my yard would also say otherworldly if their branches would describe a humanoid limb.

**Her travels included “off the beaten path” journeys, and I theorize that she would have likely experienced herself, as a woman, being the exotic, mysterious, traveler at times.

***Coatsworth’s spouse, writer Henry Beston, was the opposite, a much slower writer who needed solitude to work. Mother/housewife Coatsworth might have needed that work-fast-with-inconstant-time-available outlook for external reasons, but daughter Barnes thinks it was intrinsic to her nature. Coatsworth published around 100 books and told her daughter that she had published the most poems of any poet of her era if you excluded the para-literary sorts like Edgar Guest

Lethe

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing my April National Poetry Month observance with another poem from Louis Untermeyer’s between-world-wars anthology Modern American Poetry.  This one’s from a better-known poet than last time.

NPM starts with April Fools Day, an outdated holiday since we already had President’s Day in February, and can-you-believe-it outrages are somehow less funny this year. Yet, it’s also the day my late wife and I got married back in the 1980s. Not exactly a golden age back then either, and my wife would explain the decision to get married as a statement of the stubborn optimism of loving fools.

The poet who I’ll sing today published under the name H.D. – a nom de plume that still has a modern vibe for a pioneering Modernist. Maybe someone in our digital screen age will pay tribute by calling a project extending her work “QHD?” Something else that I’d expect might still sound modern is how she came to be a part of the Modernist vanguard that formed in England among a group including Americans living abroad. Hilda Doolittle was a young woman who had a college sweetheart. It appears they planned to get married. That other, a he in the pair, moved to England to meet up with the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. His name was Ezra Pound. Young Hilda eventually traveled to London to reconnect with Pound.

Somewhere in the passages of boats and time the romance between the two died, for there’s no guarantee that optimistic fools will continue to share the foolish accords of love. Pound was a talker, a planner, a promoter of the kind of modern American poetry Untermeyer would start to collect a few years later in his anthology with that name. Meeting Hilda in London, Ezra hatches a plan for H.D. that’s not marriage.

Looking at a bunch of poems that Hilda had brought with her to England, Pound pronounced them delightful and perfectly modern, an unbidden expression of the new poetry movement he and his little group were promoting. Pound, ever sure of himself (a trait that is dangerous in politicians, but often advantageous in artists*) scribbled at the bottom of Hilda’s poems “H.D. Imagiste.” Later on the Frenchie “e” got dropped and the new English language poetry Modernists were Imagists.

Now, I wasn’t there – chronistically excluded – but if there was a function like social media then I can Imagist a whole lot of takes on this. Manipulating the poor girl! Way to change the subject EP. Patronizing, much?

Well, here’s the unexpected part: H.D.’s poetry was  striking. Still is. She could write very compressed short poems, nothing wasted: no dallying narrative story-telling or clearly identified speakers, but the images inside these enigmas so clear and evocative.

In his introduction to H.D. Imagiste in his anthology Untermeyer wrote:

She was the only one who steadfastly held to the letter as well as the spirit of its credo. She was, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her poems are like a set of Tanagra figurines….The effect is chilling – beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves intensity. What at first seemed static becomes fluent; the arrested moment glows with a quivering tension…. A freely declared passion radiates from lines which are at once ecstatic and austere.

The poem I selected from Untermeyer’s selection is the one called “Lethe,”  and it’s a good example of this effect. She leaves interpretive space in this poem: one could read it as a curse or an elegy. Is she decrying the separated lover, wishing upon them even more separation from nature, comforts, and others? Or is she with chilling remorse stating the plain facts of the dead: that they are separated – and we the living, separated too, but able to feel and sing that. Her poem is a sensuous litany of what the dead’s senses will not feel.

Lethe

Today’s “thimbleberries.” I didn’t know what “whin” mentioned in the poem was. The Internet’s department of tautology department tells me its a variety of the gorse plant.

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I chose the latter when I performed it – thinking on a day for fools, of marrying to share each other’s foolishness. You can hear that performance of H.D.’s “Lethe” with the audio player gadget below. What, you can’t hear the no wailing of reed-bird to waken you? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Ezra Pound’s confidence did extend to politics. Alas – to say the least.

Memory of Lake Superior vs. Donald Hall’s Law

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

April is U.S. National Poetry Month, and this year I’m going to focus on poems found within an in-between-the-World-Wars anthology titled Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer. It’s a book that might have been assigned when my parents were in college, filled largely with poets that were born in the vicinity of the turn of the 20th century. I don’t know enough to comment on Untermeyer’s taste in selecting his early 20th century poets, but he seems to have interests in some areas that overlap my own: early Modernism,* humor, and poetry with proletarian and gothic themes. I assume there’s at least a trace of literary log-rolling in the selection of some of the less-well-known poets in the book, but in the short essays that he writes to introduce each poet Untermeyer often finds room for sharp critical comments – this to me is evidence of a fair-minded attempt to get his time’s consensus consideration of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson.

My plan (to the degree that my life allows plans, which is arguable) is to present around 10 poems from the hundreds in Untermeyer’s thick book. I expect one or two will be “poetry’s greatest hits” that I haven’t otherwise gotten around to, and others will be unknown poems by little-known poets. Long time readers may recall a statement I’ve taken to calling Donald Hall’s Law. That poet, a prize-winner, once wrote: “Most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die.”  Modern American Poetry  went through 6 editions between 1919 and 1942, and from a quick look, the last of the included authors died in the 1980s, and so are subject and evidence to that law. Will my efforts and your attention amend Donald Hall’s Law? Slim chance, but I enjoy sporting with its iron rule. Once some pressman ran these pages through their oily machinery, they pressed a democracy between the boards – and so, next to your Wallace Stevens and Robert Frosts, there’s the someone elses who led a life, observed it, did their best to craft some poem to convey that.

And here’s the first of those: George Dillon. Know the name? Know their poetry? This isn’t a test – I didn’t. Some reading this are likely living poets,** and you might have careerist moments in some early AM hours once the muse has worn off. Are you submitting enough, and to the right places? Did you do enough to promote your collection? Are you behind in your social media or correspondence? And while you never think this one yourself, you might still think someone else is thinking “Who do I have to sleep with to gain some traction?”

I’ve reached a age. I look at Donald Hall’s Law and am strangely comforted. I don’t need to be encouraged in dream-stoking stories about poets who achieved lasting fame. I seek out instead stories that say someone else was once here, wrote a little, and I can find them, find some pleasure in a poem or two, and say: that’s enough, or better than some other human clap trap we had no choice in hearing.

And so we have George Dillon. He made it into Untermeyer’s anthology, slotted between Robert Penn Warren and Kenneth Patchen. He was an editor at Poetry Magazine for over a decade! He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931 poetry collection! He and Edna St. Vincent Millay were lovers!

Memory of Lake Superior

Chord sheets like this one might encourage you to sing this poem too.

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I said Untermeyer could be toughly critical even of those he included. Here’s the end of his introduction to the selections of Dillon’s poetry in the anthology:

His defect is his fluency; he is sure of his craftsmanship, a little too sure. The subject-matter is conventional to the point of being stereotyped and the tone in the sonnets is a shade too pompous. Yet the verse is unusually flexible and few will question his gift of song.”

Fair enough. When I look through a collection seeking something to use here “gift of song” is going to attract me. And there’s another factor. The title of the poem I set to music is “Memory of Lake Superior.”   My late wife lived in Duluth for a while; we both loved the north shore of that Greatest Lake. My living wife too hikes there even as I’ve become too old for long walks. Besides the “words that want to break into a song” effect, Dillon’s poem is well observed: the famous red-brown sandstone, the fungal debris on the forest floors. My wife tells me*** that the thimbleberries there that Dillon mentions “have larger flowers than razzberries.” It’s National  Poetry Month, sure, but I thought leading off with a Spring poem with home field advantage would be appropriate.

Thimbleberries by Heidi Randen

Thimbleberries, their flower, their berry.

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You can hear Dillon’s “Memory of Lake Superior”  with the audio player below. Are you asking, “Has Donald Hall hidden the player to enforce his law?” No, just some ways of viewing the blog won’t show the player gadget, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

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National Poetry Month 2026 logo

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*My initial interest in the early American Modernist era was fed by having a relative (Susan Glaspell) who was part of it, but the practical aspect of having work from 1930 back being in public domain and free for unrestrained reuse makes this era primary for poetic texts to combine with music here. Though the bulk of Untermeyer’s anthology republishes work from before 1930, I am using a later edition, and it’s possible a few of the works may be borderline: e.g. Dillon’s poem is obscure enough to not have an easily findable date of first publication.

**Dead poets reading here have damnably low engagement scores, and Ouija board planchettes never click links or hit “like.”

***Again, living wife – though a ghostly partner who whispers woodland lore to me from the undiscovered country would have a certain gothic charm.